The Boy in the Rain
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Narrated by:
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Philip Battley
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By:
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Stephanie Cowell
About this listen
It is 1903 in the English countryside when Robbie, a shy young art student, meets the twenty-nine-year-old Anton who is running from memories of his brutal childhood and failed marriage. Within months, they begin a love affair that will never let them go. Robbie grows into an accomplished portraitist in the vivid London art world with the help of Anton's enchanting former wife, while Anton turns from his inherited wealth and connections to improve the conditions of the poor. But it is the Edwardian Era, and the law sentences homosexual men to prison with hard labor, following the tragic experience of Oscar Wilde. As Robbie and Anton's commitment to each other grows, the world about them turns to a more dangerous place.
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At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.
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Beautifully written and narrated!
- By melany levenson on 05-27-24
By: Willa Cather
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Sanshiro
- Penguin Classics
- By: Natsume Soseki, Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin
- Narrated by: Andrew Koji
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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One of Soseki's most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving 'real world' of Tokyo, its women and university. In the subtle tension between our appreciation of Soseki's lively humour and our awareness of Sanshiro's doomed innocence, the novel comes to life. Sanshiro is also penetrating social and cultural commentary.
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This story had no point.
- By icelandicponies on 12-30-21
By: Natsume Soseki, and others
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Fifteen Postcards
- The Old Curiosity Shop, Book 1
- By: Kirsten McKenzie
- Narrated by: Tracey Llewelyn
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Determined to save the antiques store she has inherited from ruin after the unexplained disappearance of her parents, Sarah Lester discovers a jumbled collection of vintage postcards that leads her on a journey through time. Unprepared for the story the postcards weave about their reclusive former owner, Sarah’s life is thrown into disarray as she is transported to Victorian London, colonial New Zealand, and to the British Raj in 19th-century India.
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Disappointing and disorganized
- By Miranda on 03-16-22
By: Kirsten McKenzie
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Death at Greenway
- A Novel
- By: Lori Rader-Day
- Narrated by: Moira Quirk
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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From the award-winning author of The Day I Died and The Lucky One, a captivating suspense novel about nurses during World War II who come to Agatha Christie’s holiday estate to care for evacuated children, but when a body is discovered nearby, the idyllic setting becomes host to a deadly mystery.
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Wonderful story & characters that kept me company
- By Kim Fountain on 10-24-21
By: Lori Rader-Day
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House of Trelawney
- By: Hannah Rothschild
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The seat of the Trelawney family for over 700 years, Trelawney Castle was once the jewel of the Cornish coast. Each successive Earl spent with abandon, turning the house and grounds into a sprawling, extravagant palimpsest of wings, turrets, and follies. But as the centuries passed the Earls of Trelawney, their ambition dulled by generations of pampered living, failed to develop other skills.
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Really fun read
- By Ruthi on 04-12-20
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Painting the Light
- A Novel
- By: Sally Cabot Gunning
- Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
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Story
Martha’s Vineyard, 1898. In her first life, Ida Russell had been a painter. Five years ago, she had confidently walked the halls of Boston’s renowned Museum School, enrolling in art courses that were once deemed “unthinkable” for women to take and showing a budding talent for watercolors. But no more. Ida Russell is now Ida Pease, resident of a seaside farm on Vineyard Haven and wife to Ezra, a once-charming man who has become an inattentive and altogether unreliable husband.
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Slow the narrator to speed 8 and it’s beautifully read
- By Storytellersrus on 04-21-22
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The Golden Hour
- A Novel
- By: Beatriz Williams
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins
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Overall
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Story
The Bahamas, 1941. Newly widowed Leonora “Lulu” Randolph arrives in Nassau to investigate the governor and his wife for a New York society magazine. After all, American readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the duke and duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier. What more intriguing backdrop for their romance than a wartime Caribbean paradise, a colonial playground for kingpins of ill-gotten empires? Or so Lulu imagines.
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Stick with it!
- By Colleen on 07-17-19
By: Beatriz Williams
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The Recognitions
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
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Girl in Hyacinth Blue
- By: Susan Vreeland
- Narrated by: Loren Lester, Sheryl Bernstein
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A professor shows a colleague a painting that he has kept secret for decades. The professor swears it is a Vermeer - but why has he hidden this important work for so long? The reasons unfold in a series of stories that trace ownership of the painting back to World War II and Amsterdam, and still further back to the moment of the work's inspiration.
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wonderful
- By Sybil on 04-07-03
By: Susan Vreeland
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Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Elaine Wise
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Though he embodies neither wealth nor a lavish persona, Charles Bovary - a somewhat established doctor - takes a chance in marrying the young, vibrant, and ambitious farm girl Emma Rouault. At first, Emma is delighted to be married and away from her father's farm, but her thirst for the rich and ornate lifestyle that she witnesses other people living soon drives her away from her husband and into the arms of various suitors.
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Madame Bovary doesn't disappoint
- By Arlene Olsen on 12-11-16
By: Gustave Flaubert
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Belle Cora
- A Novel
- By: Phillip Margulies
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat, Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 25 hrs and 21 mins
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Overall
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In the home where Arabella Godwin was raised it is forbidden to speak her name, and her picture is turned to the wall. But in the turbulent America of the 1850s, everyone knows her as "Belle Cora", madam of San Francisco's finest bordello. Judges and senators do her bidding; a vicious newspaper editor plots her downfall; a preacher looks at her from across his pulpit and tries to forget that once she was his wife. Merchant's daughter, farm girl, prostitute, mother - the only thing that never changes is her tireless pursuit of the one man who can see her for who she really is.
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excellent
- By Patricia on 05-15-20
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What listeners say about The Boy in the Rain
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Elaine
- 11-02-23
Rollercoaster of emotions
I hope there will be a sequel because while I enjoyed this story and the characters, the ending was very sad and I refuse to believe that is the end of Robbie and Anton’s story.
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- Steve
- 08-04-24
One of the best I’ve listened to
Every aspect of this book is compelling, The story is unique and shines a light on an ugly time in British history. The lead characters are heart rendering and the supporting characters fill out the narrative admirably. The narrator is one of the best I’ve heard, truly excellent. The story never depends on the usual and predictable tropes. I hope a sequel has been or will be written.
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- echolocation345
- 09-08-23
An entrancing, unforgettable journey into the past
Literature is at its best when it creates a kind of cocoon around the reader, and you lose touch with the here and now. That is how it was for me reading The Boy in the Rain. This novel was a multi-decade project by the author, and there is that unmistakeable feeling of layers here as though it is has been lifted from the memories of the characters as it is retold. Cowell's prose is both concise and lyrical – some periods in the lives of the two main characters, Robbie and Anton, are delved into deeply. Others are relayed with only the pertinent details, very much like when people are recounting, or simply recalling, their lives. This allows Cowell to cover a considerable period of time, drawing forward, shading, highlighting with the skill of an artist who knows where to place the emphasis, and where to hold back.
The story is told primarily from the standpoint of Robbie, a gifted young artist who moves to a small country town in Nottinghamshire to escape an unhappy home. Here he meets the handsome, slightly mysterious and elusive Anton, who, as they grow closer and eventually begin a relationship, opens him to his sexuality. At this period in Edwardian England, this is of course as beautiful a discovery as it is painful, and their complex relationship is tried as much from the outside as from the inner conflicts between them.
The story, perhaps I should say their relationship, which is the story, feels very much like a living thing, inhaling and exhaling – Anton breaks from Robbie in an attempt to repair a traditional life with his wife, and Robbie finds he must leave Anton to pursue an identity as an artist and as a man, apart from ‘just being Anton’s boy’ so to speak. These periods of growth happen for both of them for different reasons over the course of the novel, and a theme emerges around this idea of personal growth being sometimes at odds with a relationship which is, for the most part, the best thing that they have. But oh! those fiery, passionate times after a separation when they reconnect – wow! You absolutely have the sense these two cannot stay apart from each other, and your heart is just aching for them to find a means of remaining together.
I've focused a lot on the relationship between Anton and Robbie, simply because I responded so much to it, but this is also a richly vivid novel of this time in England just after Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment. This terrible episode is certainly important in shaping the lives of these characters, and yet there is nothing dreary or maudlin here, only a deeply sympathetic humanizing of the subject. One has a real sense of how life was for homosexual men in this period, and there are a number of fascinating subplots, which draw upon the attitudes in society and the laws regarding queer men at the time, one in particular which is incredibly moving and poignant.
I should mention this is also a review of the audio version of the novel, and Philip Battley did a top-notch job with this story and characters. He’s the perfect combination of intense and restrained, which is absolutely in keeping with Cowell’s vision I think. I’m sure there is a temptation for a narrator to go over the top, to go for actor’s gold in the most dramatic scenes!, but that never happens. Philip was truly an asset to this novel, he’s a tremendous talent.
I cannot recommend The Boy in the Rain highly enough. I’m grateful that Ms Cowell at last released this beautiful story into the world after so many years bringing it into being. I’m personally, well, dying for a sequel, but until that day comes I will pay it the best compliment I can by rereading/relistening to this again, and again.
The Boy in the Rain really is that good
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